Discussion

IMO the platform and marketing is missing the one indispensable thing every new cloud storage provider must have given the political climate right now - full encryption. Snowden's "avoid Dropbox because they don't have encryption" comments are everywhere in media right now. This app may actually have it, but they don't mention anything about it or even security for that matter. Specifically when there's such a focus on "social" in their marketing copy, mentioning the other side of the spectrum (privacy) is imperative. Maybe I'm the only one thinking this though.

@colemercer I just read the terms and privacy policy. Side note: They are in Hong Kong.
In the terms, they basically say that they have to read your files in order to provide targeted advertising. I think we all assumed that, but just putting it out there. So, this means that files are not encrypted. They are using https on their site, so I'm hopefully that the data transfer is secure. cc @danielkempe@stttories
The terms also say that you have to have ALL rights associated with the content you're storing. So, I would assume you couldn't store any music, movies, or tv shows that you've "purchase"--you're really only renting them.
They also say that "excessive users" will be warned via email and potentially cut off from the service.
An interesting part of the Terms is that you are granting them full authority to do whatever it takes for them to get the files to you. This ranges from managing them to playing them back to you. So, one of my thoughts is, let's assume we could store music files on their service: what if they store a single music file and just keep tabs of whomever is authorized to access that file. So, 1,000 people all upload the same song, but on their servers they only store 1 copy of that song and just have a database with the 1,000 people that can access that song. This would help with the economics of the situation. cc @brackin
I think I had other thoughts, but I've since forgotten them.

@colemercer That's a fair comment. Hive uses the same AES encryption as Dropbox, but also like Dropbox we hold the keys so it's not a complete zero-knowledge service, nor do we pretend to be. As a free, unlimited cloud service, zero-knowledge encryption would require us to disable data de-duplication which is not economically feasible.
Privacy is extremely dear to us. Our servers are all hosted in Germany where privacy is taken seriously and nothing but a court order would require us to reveal user's data.

@alxmlv I too have grown very skeptical of services that offer too much for free.
What's the use of an awesome free service if it gets shut down?
Better pay a bit less, but having a sustainable business that will support you over the years.
Let's see (and hope) that they can keep up and avoid the Springpad (sad) way.

@mbavio premium features for a payment, but the more friends you have the cheaper the price of the premium features get -- all the way down to $0 if you have more than 100 friends. Are they harvesting user data then?

@alxmlv We are well funded and we believe that users will want to pay for Premium features post Beta. We're also thrilled to have a premier hosting company as an investor (announcement soon) which more than helps with our operating costs.

@alexspencer Mobile apps should arrive in about a months time. There are no plans for desktop apps though - we'll continue to push our web app for that.
...but we have an API, so we may release that to the community in the future.

Their promise seems ambitious, the app has a really nice design so I think it worths trying it out. I'm already adding some files in for testing purposes!
My beta link invite if anyone wants to try it out too: https://beta.hive.im/join/527/